If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Re: The Lord of The Rings

I only read The Hobbit, because the actual LOTR was too hard for me :/
Omgeez that sounds so retarded! But tis true
But the movies are prolly just as good as the books so meh
LOTR is one of my all time favorite trilogies, and maybe I'll read the books soon, idk

Re: The Lord of The Rings

Originally Posted by Effie

I only read The Hobbit, because the actual LOTR was too hard for me :/
Omgeez that sounds so retarded! But tis true
But the movies are prolly just as good as the books so meh
LOTR is one of my all time favorite trilogies, and maybe I'll read the books soon, idk

You should really, just skip the first 200 pages or something
Siriously, they bored me xD

Re: The Lord of The Rings

hah, well this is a book that doesnt stop fascinating me. I cant recall how many times I've read it, but at each an every time it keeps me on the edge of the seat.
I havent read Children of Hurin, and i suppose its as good as the other books, and to tell the truth I cant choose one to be my favorite, they all are!
(so far Ive read the Hobit, The Sillmarilion, and all tomes of the Lord of the Rings)

Re: The Lord of The Rings

Yup, LOTR is TOO good, my favourite character is Sam. What I like about it is that the story goes WAY back, I mean the heroes of LOTR are puny compared to the earlier heroes, eg. The Silmarils are ancient and yet, they make the rings look like...well, rings, they're way more significant. Sauron was supposed to be the big badass but turns out he was a mere servant of Morgoth. I wish they'd make a movie about the final war(forgot it's name) when Melkor comes back and the Valar fight him. For me, the most interesting part of the book was when Sam and Frodo are lost in the cave Gollum betrays them and the spider thingy appears. The journey through Mordor is a little to gloomy and depressing. But the story line is just perfect, the book kept me glued to itself, now that this forum reminded me of it, I might as well read it again! But seriously though, this is ONE long book...

Re: The Lord of The Rings

LOTR is my no.1 movie. I really admired J.R.R.Tolkien for his work. Its really his masterpiece. :worshippy: If i'm not mistaken, LOTR is the movie which revolutionised movie world in terms of animation. Before LOTR, there's no movie as great as LOTR in terms of pictures, graphics, animation, etc.

Re: The Lord of The Rings

Hmm.. I'm not sure I have this double quote-thing down yet.. why aren't they showing up? Oh, well. There were so many good posts here that I wanted to comment on, but I'll just take it from memory instead. Great thread! I am a huge Tolkien-fan.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of The Rings to create a mythical world belonging to Anglian culture, since he felt there was need for one. He sent each finished chapter to his son who was at the time stationed in a military base (I forget where), and the story was original for his son's amusement, plus to satisfy his own obsessions with myths and languages. It was not meant to be published when he started it.

I believe the first thing he started writing about Middle-Earth was The Hobbit, during a boring sitting in on an English Exam (Tolkien was an English professor). He found a blank sheet infront of him, and started scribbling: 'In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit'.. and thus Bilbo Baggins was born.

From what I've read from various biographies, J.R.R. Tolkien's true heartchild was The Silmarillion, because that is where he collected his mythological tales, which explains a lot about the world of Middle-Earth. However, publishers were not interested in that, and wanted to print The Lord Of The Rings instead. The Silmarillion was not published until much later, to Tolkien's disappointment. Tolkien wrote The Lord Of The Rings as one thick book of chapters, and it was the publishers who forced him to make three books out of it, as they did not have the resources to print it as one volume back then. This is why today, even if we now know it as three separate books, you can buy a thick one-volume version of it, finally granting Tolkien his wish.

Tolkien took inspiration from a lot of Northern European myths, as well as Celtic ones. If you are interested, read the Ancient Norse poem Voluspaa (a rather long, but fun description of the Vikings' view of the creation and destruction of the world). You can find creatures and names in there that you will recognise from The Hobbit: Durin, Balin, among other Dwarven names, as well as Gandalf. The ancient Finnish poetry collection Kalevala is another great inspiration of his. You can find a lot of comparison between Finnish myths and linguistics and the culture of the Ents, including their love for long words.

I agree with those of you who praise Peter Jackson et al's film production. I think the reason they manage to create such a truthful filmversion of that difficult, difficult tale, was that they were all wonderfully obsessed with the original works. One of you pointed out that some of the actors wrote biographies on Tolkien, and I'm not surprised at this. I think, even if he did not believe it could be done, that Tolkien would have truly appreciated these films. They are a tribute to his work, despite the impossible task of putting literary achievements (e.g. Tolkien's obsession with words) onto screen.

*inhales*

All the above is written from my memory of reading various biographies, and may be full of faults. Feel free to correct me or add to my fact-spilling.